Marie-Louise von Franz

Who they were

Marie-Louise von Franz met Jung at eighteen and worked beside him for thirty years, translating the Greek and Latin alchemical texts that his later work depended on. She became the field's great interpreter of fairy tales, arguing that these anonymous, much-retold stories are the purest expression of archetypal patterns — no single author's psychology clouds them, so the structure of the psyche shows through plainly. Her study of the puer aeternus, the eternal youth who cannot commit to an earthly life, remains her most widely read work. She analysed over 65,000 dreams, and insisted throughout that the unconscious is not a chaos to be decoded from outside but an intelligence that answers when addressed seriously.